#argus-is

World’s highest resolution video surveillance platform by DARPA

"wide area persistent stare"

In Greek mythology there was a giant monster with 100 eyes all over his body named Argos Panoptes. Incredibly, according to the myth, he was a watchman that never slept and guarded Zeus’ lover who had been changed into a white heifer. Although this story is not real, it does serve as a backdrop to a new DARPA funded project.

  Yiannis Antoniades of BAE Systems has developed for the Pentagon a highly classified 1.8 billion megapixel camera that can be mounted on drones. Its name is ARGUS-IS, which is an acronym for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System. Like its mythological counterpart from whom it was named after, this camera is like a watchman that never sleeps.

  The ARGUS-IS, depending on what type of UAV it's attached to, will be able to be in the sky for nearly 24 hours at about 17,500 feet. The camera will also be able to cover 15 mi.² per pixel but BAE Systems indicate coverage of 100 mi.². Built within this system is 1,000,000 TB hard-drive that records everything in high-resolution. This allows the drone to feed live video back to its command station with the ability to zoom in on any area they please.

It’s been three years since we first heard about DARPA’s ARGUS-IS, but thanks to a PBS Nova special entitled “Rise of the Drones,” we finally have more information about the 1.8-gigapixel camera that is supposedly the highest-resolution surveillance system in the world. The documentary showed video footage of the imaging system in action, though the camera itself remains shrouded in mystery for security reasons. Designed to be used with UAVs like the Predator, the…

Original post:

DARPA’s 1.8-gigapixel cam touts surveillance from 20,000 feet (video)

You can see the Listing Profile on: http://technologycompanieslist.com/darpas-1-8-gigapixel-cam-touts-surveillance-from-20000-feet-video/

Yes.

A 1.8 gigapixel camera, which uses 368 five-megapixel camera sensors aimed through a telescopic array and creates 600 gigabytes of data per second or a million terrabytes of video feed in a day.

The ARGUS- IS ( Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System) is DARPA's latest offering towards air surveillance and recon. The Camera mostly aimed at being used on unmanned drones/ UAV's can spot targets which are mere 6 inches in height from an altitude of 20,000 feet. It can survey 10 square miles at any instant, and uses the persistic system to pin-point and expand data on particular areas of interest.

As for quality  of video feed ? Argus uses its 368 chips to create a 1.8 billion pixel video feed

Take a look at the video below. While DARPA shows that it can do some serious air -surveillance from 20,000 feet  - the control room deciphering of that data using persistic which can open up to 65 operating windows at the same time to create real time video feeds of different subsections, is almost unbelievable.

It will make you feel that Tom Cruise in Minority Report is no longer a Hollywood science fiction concept. 

It is the reality.

From Danger Room

Every Day, Army’s Panopticon Drone Will Collect 80 Years’ Worth of HD Video

By Spencer Ackerman

You’re in Afghanistan. You get word that a flatbed truck ferrying a weapons cache to insurgents is heading through a mountain pass your way. You want to trace the truck’s path — there might be a weapons pipeline that way — as well as its destination. But that means keeping watch over miles and miles of turf.  It’ll require a gaggle of drones and spy planes to monitor such a wide area.

Or at least it did. The Army is sending a new drone helicopter into the Afghanistan war. Three of them, actually, each one equipped with one of the most powerful sensors the U.S. military has. By the spring, soldiers will remotely pilot Boeing’s A160 Hummingbird helo — parodied above by the Taiwanime geniuses at Next Media Animation — to see across vast swaths of Afghanistan, thanks to the ultra-powerful Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, or ARGUS.

Just how powerful is ARGUS? You know, just a 1.8 gigapixel camera package, consisting of 92 five-megapixel imagers. One blink of ARGUS’ eye covers up to 36 square miles, depending on the quality of the resolution; it will give its remote pilots at least 65 independent, scaleable video windows within that blink. It was initially developed for Army Special Forces by the mad scientists at Darpa. In a single day, ARGUS collects six petabytes of video — the equivalent of 79.8 years‘ worth of HD video. You’re probably going to find that truck.

Especially if you mount ARGUS on the Hummingbird. The helicopter has a long loiter time: 20 hours in the sky, at up to 15,000 feet. If the insurgents split up and head in different directions, the Hummingbird will still be able to see all of them for miles like it was Roger Daltrey.

  If the forthcoming Afghanistan deployment isn’t the first time conventional Army forces have used the Hummingbird, it’s close to it. Lt. Col. Matthew Munster concedes that ARGUS “has never been flown on this platform before,” so he’ll start tests in the new year to make sure that all its sensors, cameras and datalinks play nicely with each other.

In addition, operators on the ground can select up to 65 steerable “windows” following separate targets to be “stared at”. Vehicles, people and other objects can be tracked even if they move in different directions.

“If you have a bunch of people leaving a place at the same time, they no longer have to say, ‘Do I follow vehicle one, two, three or four,’” said program manager Brian Leninger ahead of the system’s launch.

Via @acoutal Coutal A

Edouard Maire 1 janvier 2012 16:00

À l'instar des smartphones qui empiètent progressivement sur les plates-bandes des appareils photo compacts, les drones gagnent de plus en plus sur les avions espions, voire sur les satellites. Le dernier en date est l'A160 Hummingbird, un drone hélicoptère conçu par Boeing qui est muni d'un capteur photo de 1,8 gigapixels !

...

http://www.lesnumeriques.com/appareil-photo-numerique/drone-qui-photographie-en-gigapixels-n22649.html

voir aussi :

@UAS_VISION UAS VISIO